Dallas does not do ice very well. We usually get an ice storm once a year. Right now it’s freezing rain and sleet so The Spare’s high school is closed but the kids are responsible for their assignments which are completed digitally and turned in today. That way they don’t fall behind and the school doesn’t have to add an extra “snow” day to the school calendar. The downside, from the kids’ perspective, to utilizing Blackboard and Dropbox for school.

The Patriarch is laying a new wood floor in our back bedroom. This was originally our bedroom but when we renovated the attic into a “suite” for both boys we moved into their old room. This back bedroom has a door that opens to the back yard so it was always kind of weird sleeping there. When finished it will become the room where we watch TV and the living room will be a more formal space.

I got on this kick of reading adoption blogs. Some are strange and then some are wonderful. This week on our local PBS radio station, KERA 90.1, there was a commentary by Diane Brown who was adopted as a young girl from Korea.

“For me, as a Korean orphan adopted in the early 1960s, gratitude was intertwined with my brother and me being told that adoption saved us from fates as prostitutes and beggars. Clearly, if your parents saved you from such fates, it’s logical to be grateful to them. But I rarely felt a sense of gratitude. Being told how I should feel made me resistant, and from my mother’s perspective, I could never be grateful enough anyway. So why even try? Still, I carried around a burden of inadequacy because I knew I never could repay my parents for saving my life.”
She mentions that NPR’s Scott Simon and his wife, Caroline, adopted two children from China, and he talked about this issue in his book, Baby, We Were Meant for Each Other.

“No matter how hurt or angry your children ever make you — and they will — you must never, never, never say, ‘Don’t you know what we saved you from?’ That’s a true obscenity,” Simon wrote. “It is a curse that could discourage the pushing back and outright rebellion that’s necessary for children to grow … We don’t want a feeling of indebtedness to steer their lives.” The key word in Simon’s statement is indebtedness, not gratitude.”

I think this is an interesting concept to explore, the difference between indebtedness and gratitude.

1 Response to 7 Quick Takes, Icy Dallas Edition

The concept of indebtedness vs. gratitude is definitely interesting. It reminds me of reading Daddy Long Legs and its sequel (the protagonist complains about how grateful orphans are always supposed to feel).